Making the World 125 Percent Better
Words: Jesse Ashlock
In their seminal 1997 essay "The ABC of Tactical Media," Net activists David Garcia and Geert Lovink staked out ground for their brand of technology-driven arts practice as "a qualified form of humanism," one which offers "an antidote to newly emerging forms of technocratic scientism which under the banner of post-humanism tend to restrict discussions of human use and social reception." Tactical media artists, those clever opportunists who exploit cheaply available media resources as a strategy to create more communication, democracy and freedom, are often defined oppositionally -- Garcia and Lovink called them "the happy negatives" -- and tied to a specific political agenda. But it's no stretch to say that most anyone working at the intersection of art and technology is pursuing a kind of humanism all too often overlooked in modern scientific inquiry, whether their aim is to crush a corporation or merely offer a more thoughtful way to understand the world.
That's a tricky business -- combining art and technology -- one which often encounters resistance from skeptics, who, depending on their biases, ask questions such as "It may be art, but is it science?" or "It may be science, but is it art?" At the same time, the choice to make art using computational media is a choice to work with stuff everyone recognizes and understands. "It's not the media of an arcane community of expertise, like ceramics or painting," comments Natalie Jeremijenko, a professor at the University of Southern California, San Diego and one of the field's most respected practitioners. "Basically, it's the media of everyday life." Inasmuch, artists working with these media have opted to work on a front of social change. That's a choice artists have made for centuries, which is why the naysayers who complain because they can't categorize the work are so exasperating. "Have they heard of Leonardo?" Jeremijenko wonders.
Some people do understand this. The curatorial community has begun supporting the work, led by galleries like Bitforms and European festivals like Ars Electronica and Next Five Minutes. Large contemporary art museums have followed, with New York's Whitney clumsily (some would say cluelessly) showcasing tech artists and Mass MoCA's new Interventionists exhibit collecting a wide array of important work under one roof. The academy, while sometimes suspicious of electronic art, and perhaps not entirely certain what it is, has nonetheless begun clearing room for it within its hallowed walls. Strong research universities like Carnegie Mellon, Rensselaer Polytechnic and UCSD, where much of the work began on the down-low, are now launching "official" academic programs in art and technology. Most importantly, technology artists are finding ways to nurture their own practice by developing new kinds of labs, both inside the academy and out. In certain ways they resemble conventional media labs, but they emphasize group participation over individual achievement and public goods over profit-based work. There are multiple models of this breed of "open" labs that privilege information sharing and access to needed resources, each worth considering.
Academic Approaches
The MIT Media Lab is the world's most venerable, thanks in large part to founder Nicholas Negroponte's powerful and unique funding model. Sponsors underwrite a consortia of independent research groups, diffusing researchers' accountability to any one corporate interest. Within this context, it's possible for someone like Chris Csikszentmihályi, head of the Computing Culture Group since 2001, to function with relative autonomy. Unlike many of his engineering-trained counterparts, Csikszentmihályi went to art school and lends a strong humanities and social sciences background to his group's technology projects. "I love science and engineering," Csikszentmihályi comments. "And there's lots they're good at. But you [can] also look at what they miss, what's occluded by their success. And there's lots that's valuable in human experience that's not covered well in science and engineering. What are the technologies for racism? What are the technologies for peace? What are the technologies for all these things that don't seem to be designed for?"
The Computing Culture Group's eight members work with an awareness of technology's history, politics, anthropology, sociology and philosophy, a perspective overwhelmingly neglected in conventional engineering training. CCG operates in a three-story open space known as "The Cube" it shares with two other groups. While they're adamant about being perceived as technologists, an art school ethos underscores their activity, meaning they're often the lab's messiest group, and also (in keeping with the tactical tradition) the least dependent on expensive technical resources. Some might argue that this means the group isn't creating new technologies, just goofing around with existing ones, but CCG's point is that it's not interested in cool "gee whiz" gadgetry, but rather social technologies that give us a better handle on our culture.
Often these take the form of personal politics, like Limor Fried's wearable cell phone jammer, which disconnects any cell phone within a small radius. This technology has already been designed (and quickly outlawed), but Fried open sourced it, allowing individuals to construct their own with readily available materials as a way of protesting others' tendency to invade their personal space by speaking to their machines at aggressive volumes. Kelly Dobson's ScreamBody deals with similar issues. This "surrogate lung" allows wearers to scream in inappropriate situations (the office, the classroom), then release their cries in a more appropriate setting.
Other projects empower individuals by reversing the hierarchies of socialized technologies. Tad Hirsch's Critical Cartography exercises (some in collaboration with the Institute for Applied Autonomy and various privacy advocates) utilize data collection and mapmaking technology to help urban activists monitor and undermine the proliferation of unregulated security cameras. Ryan McKinley's Open Government Information Awareness system (OGIAS) also challenges the mechanisms of surveillance, capturing faces of government officials from C-SPAN to construct a database of American government -- a literal inversion of John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, designed to require greater transparency in government practice.
Many CCG projects, like ScreamBody, constitute what Csikszentmihályi calls "exemplar technologies," which you might not manufacture and distribute, but which "do political work just by the fact that they exist." But sometimes projects' political work is bound with a more conventional practical application. Csikszentmihályi's Afghan Explorer, a semi-autonomous tele-operated robot "stringer" designed to report on wartorn areas the human press can't reach, is one example. Devised in response to reports of Pentagon press censorship during the war in Afghanistan, the Explorer confronts First Amendment issues while offering media companies looking to improve their war coverage a very real technological solution.
Still, reaction to these activist technologies can be skeptical, even derisive. While Csikszentmihályi appreciates the freedom of the Media Lab, he acknowleges the obstacles he faces within it. The "demo or die" imperative that governs lab research doesn't always work for his group. "I relive the two cultures problem every day in every way," he remarks, recalling once being asked to quantify his results using a DARPA quad chart, the standard format for presentations to DARPA, and having to explain that it wasn't really feasible for his line of work. "I guess I said that I would make the world 125 percent better," he recollects. "Disprove me."
Jeremijenko is well acquainted with the tin ears the academy can have for the subtleties of the field. Before leaving this summer for UCSD, she worked in Yale's engineering deparment, where her first dean, Allan Bromley, a former science advisor to the first President Bush, once called her a "fuzzy social science tree-hugging type of engineer" (she took it as a compliment). Bromley made the remark because Jeremijenko's pedagogy, like her practice, focuses on human beings as interdependent technological actors within social networks, a perspective she sees as every bit as important as traditional engineering design's focus on the relationship of complex interactive components within a system. Consequently, she insists that social criticism always be generative of design. Her feral robotic dogs project, part of her mechanical engineering curriculum at Yale (since adapted by other institutions), is illustrative. Students adapt low-cost consumer toys to release "into the wild" at a site of community interest -- say, a Superfund site where a hospital is planned. There the dog "sniffs out" otherwise imperceptible environmental contaminants, rendering them legible to the layperson in ways arcane, possibly inaccurate EPA documents could not. Thus, making the dog work right requires complex socio-political analysis. The technical problem is a social one.
That socio-technical orientation has always distinguished Jeremijenko's work. Both her SuicideBox, the motion-activated surveillance system designed to monitor jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge she created with her group Bureau of Inverse Technology, and its accompanying Despondency Index, a graphical cross-referencing of the Dow Jones Industrial Average with the moving average of the suicide rate of the Golden Gate Bridge, ask questions about the kinds of human activity privileged by technology, while using technology to render human activity experientially. Within Yale's upper levels, this ethos was admired, but less so within engineering. The art department wasn't much help either. "What often happens [at institutions] is they think digital media is an issue of production," she says. "They don't think it's an intellectual industry." As a result, she often lacked the resources and support to create a climate and workspace to foster rigorously critical design work.
For her, UCSD is another story. Through an unusual constellation of circumstances, including research strength, a strong engineering program, an uncommonly savvy and impressively credentialed arts faculty and a long history of student interest in art and technology, UCSD can "provide the intellectual palette that allows for critical technical work to be done." Remarkably, the school even offers an undergraduate college, Sixth College, devoted to art and technology. The faculty, Jeremijenko says, includes "more academics of direct interest for my work in that one campus than in every other campus combined." No wonder so many noteworthy creative tech activists, including Csikszentmihályi and RTMark associate and RPI profesor Igor Vamos, did graduate work at UCSD.
Jeremijenko's new faculty appointment is in the art department, but her pedagogical mandate remains focused on establishing an environment of socially aware technical work. She brings with her HowStuffIsMade, a visual encyclopedia of manufacturing and labor conditions associated with modern products begun at Yale, which will be further developed in the coming years by students at a consortium of American universities. A counter to How Stuff Works, the venerable book series (and now Web site) detailing the mechanics of everyday products, HowStuffIsMade collects student photo-essays that consider those products' social context -- Chinese fortune cookies made in America by Hispanic labor, for instance. HowStuffIsMade demands more accountability from manufacturers, but because it exists in the public domain (using the collaborative Web-based platform Twiki), it also requires higher standards of evidence from students, fostering information sharing and peer review. "It's a tremendous weapon of mass instruction," Jeremijenko explains.
That structure of participation is key to her notion of a successful lab. This means open access to space and shared computational resources, a marked contrast to the security-conscious, one-student-one-computer approach that governs many American media labs. Jeremijenko's focus on accountability also mandates exhibition space; "Exhibit or expire" is her "demo or die." Most of all, Jeremijenko emphasizes a culture of critical engagement. "I think an institutional context of social critique is generative of socially critical work," she says. Unfortunately, such contexts are too often hard to come by in American universities.
The Nonprofit Model
One nice thing about nonprofits is that they're often founded for the express purpose of establishing a contest of social critique. The nonprofit setting also frees the tech artist from obstacles of academic politicking and bureaucracy. It can also offer its own headaches -- nonprofits' precarious financial status can make them risk-averse about provocative projects that might lead to litigation. But the freedom is what draws Jonah Peretti to New York's Eyebeam, where he can focus on projects without worrying about his tenure case. Peretti, himself a product of MIT's Media Lab, heads Eyebeam's R+D Department, where he's constantly on the prowl for "cheap, easy, smart" technological methods for creating "opportunities for freedom, opportunities for creativity, or opportunities to have an impact."
These methods have involved gaming, wireless communications, P2P technology, surveillance, sound design, robotics and more. Some of Eyebeam R+D's best known projects have come out of its Contagious Media Design Lab, an extension of the contagious experiments Peretti began at MIT. A hybrid think tank and design lab, CMDL tries to facilitate the rapid spread of memes using the viral power of electronic media. The popular Fundrace.org, which allows the public to track individual contributions to presidential candidates as recorded by the FEC, is one particularly successful recent CMDL initiative. Like HowStuffIsMade and Government Information Awareness, this is a "sticky" project that relies on people's interest to force greater transparency in the machinations of government and industry. Another project, Tomspetition.org, a collaboration with the Brady Center to renew the Assault Weapons Ban, illustrates another advantage to nonprofit work. "I feel like the tactical media people don't partner enough with existing organizations," Peretti explains. Using the Brady group's extensive resources, Eyebeam is advancing the science of online petitioning with a system that shows everyone who forwards the petition the six degrees of people they've reached on a private Web page.
Peretti has long sought to nurture multiple projects simultaneously, so he's planning a new dedicated space (actually called "Open Lab") for R+D. But doing so without changing the group's character can be problematic. "How do you get the best from a group of artists and activists in a warehouse with little resources but infinite creativity and possibility, and a media lab, where you have all this equipment and access and bandwidth and opportunity?" he asks. The key is outfitting the space with resources for screen-based projects, electronics, tangible work and Web design, while maintaining a spirit of collaborative production. Thus the plan calls for a central open space to foster group participation and communal exhibition areas to encourage public involvment. The openness is extended to an online network of collaborators, and to intellectual property, which remains in the public domain through open sourcing and Creative Commons licensing so the group's creative life isn't encumbered by contract-based work. Here again, creating an environment that encourages transparency is vital in doing work that demands the same of the world at large.
The Indie Angle
For an independent cooperative like Los Angeles' C-Level, collaborative production is a bedrock principle. Founded by graduates of Cal Arts' Integrated Media Program, C-Level fosters a collaborative spirit by re-visioning the traditional artist's studio in a group context, bringing together disparate skill sets to create large-scale projects. A basement space reached through a labyrinth of Chinatown back alleys, C-Level is closer to the shadowy hacktivist warehouses of the popular imagination than more structured spaces, but certain open lab hallmarks apply, most notably an emphasis on shared computational resources and public exhibition space.
"The do-it-yourself, hacker, punk rock ethos is a big part of C-Level for me," says the group's Mark Allen, alluding to the tradition of "sharing information and profound openness" that accompanies that ethos. While most working in art and technology would probably agree to varying degrees, it's more explicit in an artist-run environment like C-Level, which lacks bureaucratic infrastructure and is maintained through its 10 members' monthly dues. "Part of the reason we do C-Level the way we do is to avoid a certain kind of sluggishness," explains fellow member Eddo Stern, "to sort of be really quick about making things happen."
While more fluid and organic than institutional open lab environments, C-Level's scope of activity is similar, ranging from screenings to workshops to electronic artworks that often include a performative element. Many projects employ gaming technology to create social engagement on a cognitive level. For instance, the ongoing Tekken Torture Tournament outfits players with electrical armbands that shock them when their onscreen counterparts take a hit. Waco Resurrection, soon to be expanded into a massive online multiplayer game, is a participatory role-playing game that revisits the standoff of the Branch Davidians. These projects exploit the familiar -- the media of everyday life -- to critique the politics of the gaming industry and of the broader society.
There aren't many parallels for C-Level in the US -- indie labs of its ilk are more common abroad, where artist groups often receive government subsidies -- but the collective's success should serve as a model for ambitious artists looking to do creative technological work in a collective setting.
Theory and Practice
The open labs can be seen as domains of a new kind of intellectual, one who seeks engagement with the world, in contrast to thinkers of past generations who remained cloistered in the Ivory Tower. "In science and engineering, in academia, you're accountable to your community of expertise," Jeremijenko asserts. "But this practice of using technology in the realm of art means that you are by definition accountable to a public." Peretti points to Steve Kurtz, the University of Buffalo professor and longtime Critical Art Ensemble member (at this writing detained by the FBI on weapons charges stemming from his biotech art projects) as one of the first of this new breed of theoretical practitioners. Whether they identify themselves as such or not, most artists working with technology can be seen as following in that legacy of actively linking the art, science and critical theory communities with society at large.
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways," Marx famously wrote. "The point is to change it." Sixties social activists loved this idea, central to Marx's doctrine of "revolutionary practice," but it serves as an even better battle cry for artists working to unlock technology's creative potential. Today's tech artists also show a pragmatic streak the radicals of the New Left often lacked, which should help them to build more and better spaces to work for years to come.
